The director Emma Rice and her Kneehigh company scored a delightful smash hit with their witty and ingenious stage adaptation of the beloved film Brief Encounter, a show that enjoyed success in both the West End and on Broadway. Now she has crossed the Channel to get her hands on another famous picture, Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), in which the novelty was that the often banal dialogue was sung in a kind of sub-operatic recitative with music by Michel Legrand.

I have to say that the film is far from being my own tasse de tisane, with its Gallic artiness and a whimsical charm that often borders on the downright kitsch.

And since Rice’s stage adaptation is pretty faithful to the original – though she has roughed it up a bit, with a louche narrator, engagingly played by the busty cabaret artiste Meow Meow, plus a trio of hunky, dancing French sailors – the show didn’t do much for me either.

I’ll get stick for saying so, but this strikes me as the kind of evening that will appeal to susceptible women in the audience, who will wallow in the bittersweet romance of it all, while most of the chaps will be bored stiff, though they will just have to grin and bear it if they want to keep their partners happy.

The story is simply told. It is 1957, and 17-year-old Genevieve , who works in her mother’s umbrella shop in Cherbourg, falls in love with a young local car mechanic. Unfortunately, he is called up to fight in Algeria, and after a single night of passion (which bizarrely appears to be consummated on the public highway in Rice’s staging) he departs for active service only for Genevieve to discover she is pregnant. Should she wait for him to return or marry a rich, older jeweller who is deeply in love with her and prepared to raise her child as his own?

There is little psychological insight in the writing and the fact that all the dialogue is sung serves to underline its banality. “I am afraid she will develop a nervous complaint from the life that we lead,” sings the mother. It’s not exactly Sondheim, is it?

I found it hard to warm to a heroine who so quickly takes the pragmatic way out of her difficulty, and the young lovers are in any case given curiously charmless, sexually tepid performances by Carly Bawden and Andrew Durand.

Worse still, there is only one decent song amid the interminable recitative. Legrand’s I Will Wait for You is certainly a dreamily romantic melody, but a musical with only one great number seems to me to be short-changing its audience.

Joanna Riding is excellent as the anxious, control-freak of a mother, and Lez Brotherston’s designs, featuring architectural models and the words “Je t’aime” in red neon, are ingenious.

Nevertheless, for all its attempts to seduce the audience, I found this an impossible show to love. Even the poignant ending feels like too little, too late.